Procrastination (english)

All people will procrastinate at some point of their lives. When are we procastinating? Normally we do it when we are in stress, when we have the feeling we are grasping for time and there is none or when we are tired and are not able to get the work done we should finish in the amount of time we are given, id est we go home and have not finish what we used to finish until it is time to go home. In such moments we feel low and with little energy.

Are you procrastinating at the moment?

When you are procrastinate currently ask yourself what has to change that you stop doing it? Are you ready for a break? Are you worrying about something which is disturbing your concentration? What has to change to calm you down? How could you be able to rise your concentration?

What could you do to change your situation? There is a very simple tool which could change your situation. I am sure you write yourself a To-Do-List every day and it will be adjusted as the day proceeds. But it does not tell you which tasks of your list are important and which are less important. Therefore I will introduce to you a helpful tool.

Eisenhower matrix

Perhaps you have already heard or read about this matrix but never used it, because you have the feeling that it is complicated to integrate into you daily life. When you understand which items of you To-Do-List are written into which field you will realise how simple this matrix works.

Important – urgent

not important – urgent

important – not urgent

not important – not urgent

As you see you find four fields and the most important for you is the top left field where it says: Important and urgent. These are the tasks which have to be done immediately and it does not matter whether you like to do them or not. It is wise to start the day with these tasks because you often will not like to do them and you will be proud if you finish them as a lot of pressure which has lasted on your shoulders drops off. After you finished these you may start with the important ones which are not urgent. These are the things you like to do and which are the business of your heart. You will dive into those and get into your work flow. When you have worked on those you might have to work on some not important but urgent tasks again, exempli gratia like writing some mails, doing some inconvenient phone calls, doing some routine work and so on.

Last but not least you will have to think of the last field. This is the most boring field of all. Now it is your duty to think whether the tasks you copied from your To-Do-List into this field have to be solved at all or whether it can be thrown into the bin. Everything you are not able to throw away you may work on when you are really tired, bored or as I keep saying “Do it between Christmas and New Year’s Eve” which means when nobody is disturbing you and there is hardly any daily business to be done.

Delegate

Have you gone through your To-Do-List and thought about the tasks which can be given to someone else? If not, why not. There is nothing to be ashamed of by passing work on to someone who might be better qualified for that task or even pass it on to a student who is doing an internship in your company. Especially students are happy to have tasks that challenge them.

What stops you of delegating?

Think about your reasons why you do not delegate some of your work to colleagues. Write the reasons on a peace of paper and think about possibilities to overcome you obstacales. Be creative in you solutions.